Performance Overclocked
I first played with Gigabyte’s OC Guru 2 software, which refused to let me change any voltages, let alone core and memory like it claims. So much for that. The software itself is fairly clunky, you have to type in the clock values you want or wait forever while you scroll one MHz at a time up to them. When you’re putting a 750MHz memory OC in place that takes rather of a long time. In the end I resorted to EVGA’s Precision X software. It gave me a voltage slider (not a +/- slider either! A straight up core voltage slider) and has slider bars for core and memory clocks as well. I’d like to see Gigabyte put the time and effort they put into the cooler on this card into the OCing software. The GTX650 lacks Turbo Boost, which makes overclocking much more accurate as you aren’t fighting the built in overclocking that Turbo Boost does. It also means that the card won’t throttle to stay within its TDP.
I eventually settled on a +130MHz core overclock with the core voltage at 1.138v (the maximum). The memory got a 746MHz overclock! That’s the effective clock speed difference, the base clock speed went up 186MHz, which is still well over 10%. This card overclocks quite nicely! I expect the core would keep going up if it had access to more voltage. Let’s see how the benchmarks change!
One final note, the card did not make any more noise (cooling or otherwise) overclocked compared to stock. Nor did temps change in any meaningful way. Power draw (measured in 3D11 test 4) went up to
Alien vs Predator DX11
AvP gave me a result of 26FPS overclocked, a gain of 15.% over stock. That’s quite solid.
Batman Arkham
Batman’s average FPS are up 15.6%, I like how the overclocking is going so far.
Battlefield 3
Battlefield 3 is only up 11.5%, what a slacker.
Civilization 5
Civilization 5 returned a result of 31.35 FPS overclocked, for a gain of 13%. Not bad for a CPU bound game.
Metro 2033
Metro 2033 is up 20.2%, but still unplayable on average.
Now to the synthetics!
3DMark03
10.9% higher here. Less of a gain than I expected.
3DMark Vantage
Vantage is up 11.8%.
3DMark11
Up 11.3% here. Not a massive score, but good for the price.
HWBot Unigine Heaven DX11 Extreme Preset
Heaven is up 13.6%
All told the gain from OCing is pretty solid, and with the cooler and the voltage limit there’s little in the way of meaningful risk, other than crashes.
Full system power draw at idle overclocked is ~70w. At load in 3D11 test 4 that rises to 151w, temperatures at idle are ~24c and at full system load ~48c. Power draw rose 5.5% and core temps went up 6.6%. Definitely worth overclocking this card, if you don’t mind the crash-prone process.
